LIV Golf has announced the first four dates of its 2025 calendar, with the start of the season set to have a marked international feel. The 2025 LIV season will begin with dates in Saudi Arabia, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
LIV will debut in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, with its inaugural 2025 tournament on February 6-8 at Riyadh Golf Club. One week later, on February 14-16, LIV will return to Adelaide, Australia, at The Grange Golf Club, home of LIV’s most popular and raucous event to date, the 2024 Australian stop. Two weeks later, on March 7-9, LIV will tee off at Hong Kong Golf Club. One week after that, LIV will travel to Singapore’s Sentosa Golf Club for the tournament on March 14-16. The remainder of LIV’s schedule, including domestic events, will be announced in the future.
The 2025 Masters will be played from April 10-13, and many of its players qualified through previous victories, so LIV Golf has structured its schedule to allow players to compete in all major tournaments.
The structure and timing of the announcement is another indicator of LIV’s intention to become a much more international tour than the PGA Tour, which is primarily held in the United States. At a time when golf is gaining popularity around the world, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, it is a strategy designed to reach budding golf fans where they are, rather than expecting them to tune in and tune into events taking place on the other side of the world.
The LIV schedule will be demanding for players, particularly those living in the United States, due to all the time zone changes and substantial travel involved. This would be the cost of the substantial paychecks LIV players have received, regardless of promises or plans to play less golf and spend more time with family. LIV is clearly giving the image of an organization that plans for a long-term, internationally-based future.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the financial backers of LIV Golf and the PGA Tour, announced a strategic merger/alignment 15 months ago, but since then there has been little indication that any kind of true unification is imminent. For now, the two sides are pursuing separate paths and separate timetables.
Several LIV players remain competitive and compelling figures even though they aren’t as visible as they were on the PGA Tour. Bryson DeChambeau is the defending U.S. Open champion, Jon Rahm was in the hunt for an Olympic gold medal until the final holes and Brooks Koepka has a T2 and a major win since jumping to LIV. Still, as popular as LIV players are and as successful as they’ve been in competing against their PGA Tour opponents, it’s now almost certain that the only time they’ll cross paths as a group with the PGA Tour in 2025 will be at the four majors.
